The Marine Corps has declared its version of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 fighter ready for limited combat operations, a milestone for the Pentagon’s costliest weapons program, according to three people familiar with the decision.

General Joseph Dunford, the Marine Corps commandant, made the decision, according to the people, who asked not to be identified in advance of an announcement expected on Friday afternoon. Members of Congress were being notified of the decision.

The declaration of “initial operational capability” came more than five years later than originally predicted in 2001, when the F-35 program began. Earlier delays resulted from difficulties in reducing the plane’s weight, with its propulsion system and with reliability.

Shortcomings in the current version of the fighter’s software limit how many weapons it can carry and how many planes can share data during a mission.

The Marine model, the F-35B, is the most complex of three versions. It’s being watched as a bellwether for the program, which is projected to cost $391.1 billion for a planned fleet of 2,443 aircraft. The Marines plan to buy about 353 F-35Bs. The U.K. and Italy also are buying the model.

Dunford’s declaration, reported by Reuters earlier on Friday, allows for a 10-aircraft squadron at Yuma, Arizona, to take on certain combat missions until software giving the F-35 its full capability is scheduled to be available by late 2017.

Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer told Congress last month that the jet’s operating software is ready to go “with some minor workarounds” that will be remedied.

Marine Corps officials say the aircraft could perform the full spectrum of missions, from close air support of ground troops to air-to-air duels, if it’s called into combat.

Currently, “the F-35B’s sensor, self-defense, and stealth capabilities will be nearly identical to the 2017 fully combat configured F-35, making it capable in highly contested threat environments,” Major Paul Greenberg, a Marine Corps spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Still, while two aircraft could swap accurate data, a four-plane formation couldn’t share information gathered by ground and air sensors until the software is improved.

Also, current F-35Bs are limited to carrying two air-to-air or GPS-guided air-to-ground weapons in an interior weapons bay and none under its wings. The improved software due in 2017 will let the aircraft carry four or more varied weapons.

In a ground-attack mission, current F-35Bs have limited means to communicate with troops, spot targets and fly at night, according to the Pentagon’s director of combat testing, Michael Gilmore. The aircraft also have limited electronic warfare capability to detect and counter enemy air defenses, according to Gilmore’s office.

“The limitations result in increased pilot workload and the likelihood” that if the F-35B is used in combat, it “will need the support of a command-and-control system or other aircraft that will improve situation awareness and assist them in employment of the limited weapons,” Gilmore’s spokesman, Air Force Major Eric Badger, said in an e-mail.

In contested airspace, the F-35B “would need to avoid threat engagements and will likely require augmentation by other friendly forces,” he said.

Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates placed the F-35 on probation in January 2011 over reliability concerns. That was lifted a year later as the aircraft’s performance improved, but a new assessment by the head of Pentagon combat weapons testing may resurrect the earlier questions.

The F-35B demonstrated poor reliability in a 12-day exercise at sea, according to Gilmore, the U.S. military’s top testing officer. Six F-35Bs were available for flights only half of the time needed, Gilmore said in a July 22 memo. A Marine Corps spokesman said the readiness rate was more than 65 percent.

The Taliban’s Islamic scholars and senior officials offered allegiance to Mansour and recognized him as ‘Leader of the Faithful,’ the militant group’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar died in Pakistan in April 2013, the Afghan government said Wednesday.

Mansour is among Taliban leaders who have supported pursuing peace talks with the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Jawid Kohistani, a political analyst in Kabul, said by phone Thursday. He also is close to Pakistan’s main Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Kohistani said.

“Mansour has many challengers, and there could be a big power play that ensues,” Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said in an e-mail. “Peace talks will be left in the lurch, unfortunately.”

Mansour has been directing day-to-day Taliban operations in Afghanistan against U.S.-led coalition troops since 2001, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad, a senior Taliban commander in southern Helmand province, said by phone Thursday. He also has played a central role in appointing Taliban commanders and shadow governors in the war-torn country, Mullah Mohammad said.

The second round of Afghan peace talks, which had been due to take place Friday, have been postponed at the request of the Taliban leadership, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said Thursday. It cited the uncertainty resulting from the announcement of Mullah Omar’s death. No new date was given.

The Afghan Taliban themselves said Thursday that Mullah Omar died following an unspecified illness, though it didn’t say when. Friday’s statement said that two Haqqani network members were named as Mansour’s deputies.

Mullah Mansour was born in 1960 in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province, according to the Afghan Biographies website. It was in Kandahar in the 1990s that the Taliban were founded by Mullah Omar.

Mansour developed his relationship with Pakistani intelligence during the 1980s, when he fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Hasibullah Fawzi, a senior member of Afghanistan government’s High Peace Council, said by phone.

Mansour served as the minister of civil aviation when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001.

As the leader of the Taliban, Mansour probably won’t benefit from the same esteem that Mullah Omar had, said Kohistani.

Mullah Omar was regarded as the spiritual leader of the Taliban, while Mansour “is a military commander and a good warrior, but can’t be the leader of the faithful,” Kohistani said.

Mansour’s deputies are Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Sirajuddin Haqqani. The Haqqani network has been blamed for some of the most high-profile terrorist attacks in Kabul in recent years.

Not all new rules are about cost savings. Employees were also told that they can no longer bring rival companies’ food to work, because it doesn’t show the proper respect to Kraft Heinz products

]]>http://business.financialpost.com/news/fp-street/kraft-ditches-free-snacks-for-employees-in-cost-crackdown-following-heinz-merger/feed0std0730jelloSavour a memorable lunch in London: Top 20 best fixed-price meals from some of Britain’s finest chefshttp://news.nationalpost.com/life/travel/savour-a-memorable-lunch-in-london-top-20-best-fixed-price-meals-from-some-of-britains-finest-chefs
http://news.nationalpost.com/life/travel/savour-a-memorable-lunch-in-london-top-20-best-fixed-price-meals-from-some-of-britains-finest-chefs#commentsFri, 31 Jul 2015 13:40:42 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=844470

Lunch is tough for most London restaurants. While dining rooms are often packed for dinner, they are quieter during the day.

That means chefs have to offer deals to entice us. Why resist? Here are 20 lunches to savour:

The Clove Club

This informal restaurant in Shoreditch Town Hall, East London, is a destination for chefs from around the U.K. and overseas. It’s so popular, you have to buy a ticket and pay in advance for dinner. Chef Isaac Hayes is at the forefront of modern British cooking, using a few great ingredients to create memorable dishes. No need to pay upfront for the bargain lunch. It’s 35 pounds for three courses and 65 pounds for five. 380 Old Street, The City, EC1V 9LT; thecloveclub.com.

Café Murano

Angela Hartnett is one of the U.K.’s best-loved chefs, known for her warm personality and unfussy Italian food. The new branch of Café Murano, in Covent Garden, looks great. Friendly service helps, but the seasonal food alone would probably keep you coming back. The set lunch may feature dishes such as risotto with peas and Berkswell cheese and apricot tart with mascarpone. It’s 16.50 pounds for two courses, 21 pounds for three. 34-36 Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, WC2E 7PB; cafemurano.co.uk.

Dabbous

This is simply one of the finest lunches in London. Ollie Dabbous is gaining an international reputation for his creative gastronomy. The chef’s restaurant in Fitzrovia has a stripped- down industrial look, so all your focus is on the plate. That’s fine because his dishes easily withstand such scrutiny. Each is so well-balanced, the only wobble you are likely to get is from the table. The peas and mint is one of my favourite starters in London. Lunch is 35 pounds for four courses. 39 Whitfield Street, Fitzrovia, W1T 2SF; dabbous.co.uk.

Fera

Simon Rogan is among Britain’s finest chefs. It’s unlucky for Londoners that his flagship L’Enclume is more than three hours away by train. It’s worth the trip, but you can sample his seasonal cooking a little closer to home at Claridge’s. The set lunch is great value, with dishes such as guinea hen with salt- baked celeriac, buttered kale, and cider sauce. It’s 30 pounds for three courses. 49 Brook Street, Claridge’s, Mayfair, W1K 4HR; feraatclaridges.co.uk.

John Carey/Café MuranoThe new branch of Café Murano, in Covent Garden, looks great.

Gymkhana

I like Gymkhana so much, I once ate at this Mayfair restaurant four times in a week, including twice on the same day. The set lunch is my favourite in London. Indian food isn’t for everyone, but few could fail to appreciate Gymkhana’s fine ingredients, precise cooking, and faultless spicing. My favourite meal is to get together with friends and order all five starter and main options on the lunch menu. Gymkhana can get very busy. It pays to book early. Lunch is 25 pounds for two courses, 30 pounds for three. 42 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 4JH; gymkhanalondon.com.

Hutong

This is one of my favourite Chinese restaurants in London for food, particularly the Sichuan dishes. Factor in the stunning views from Level 33 of the Shard and you are surely on to a winner. I often recommend Hutong, especially to people who tell me food isn’t good at restaurants with a view. And yet I hesitate to include the set lunch here because I’d rather go and order dim sum. The lunch is 35 pounds. The Shard, London Bridge, SE1 9RY; hutong.co.uk.

The Ivy

This is a restaurant that for a few years might have been described as once-fashionable. No more. Following a refurbishment earlier this year, this Covent Garden institution is packed. It’s buzzy, beautiful and fun. The bar in the center of the room is one of the best places to sit, so don’t feel short-changed if you end up there. The menu is eclectic, accessible and inexpensive. The set lunch may include watermelon carpaccio with creamed feta; and sesame, Turkish delight, and pistachio coupe. It’s 21.75 pounds for two courses and 26.25 pounds for three. 1-5 West Street, Covent Garden, WC2H 9NQ; the-ivy.co.uk.

Koffmann’s

Pierre Koffmann mentored countless chefs-including Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay-at the three-Michelin-star La Tante Claire. These days he is cooking simpler food at his restaurant in the Berkeley, in Knightsbridge. But his focus on flavour is ever-present. He’s in the kitchen on most weekdays, cooking the kind of food he learned to love as a child in southwest France. The set lunch includes dishes such as roasted rack and belly of pork with turnip gratin. It’s 26 pounds for three courses. 1 Wilton Place, Berkeley Hotel, Knightsbridge, SW1X 7RL; the-berkeley.co.uk.

The Ritz

The Ritz restaurant is among the finest in London and also one of the most beautiful. It’s unfortunate that more people don’t get the chance to try chef John Williams’s superb French cooking. The prices are slightly less scary than you might think. There’s a three-course menu for 49 pounds. It’s the wine list that is unforgiving, along with the dress code. This is the only restaurant I know in London where men must wear a tie. But it is worth it if you can get a table on the terrace on a summer’s day. 150 Piccadilly, Mayfair, W1J 9BR; theritzlondon.com.

Zedel

This grand brasserie-from the owners of the ultra- fashionable Wolseley-is dramatic. It looks like something out of an impressionist painting, with its high ceilings, marble pillars, brass rails, and large mirrors and waiters scurrying across the room. The menu fits the bill, with all the usual brasserie favourites. But the real shock comes from the prices, which are low. The prix fixe menu is 9.75 pounds for two courses and 12.50 pounds for three; the Formule menu is 19.75 pounds for three courses, including a glass of wine, water and coffee. 20 Sherwood Street, Soho, W1F 7ED; brasseriezedel.com.

Richard Vine/Bloomberg NewsA dish from the highly recommended Hutong, which also offers stunning views from Level 33 of the Shard in London.

After you run through the Top 10, here are 10 more to try:

Craft London: Chef Stevie Parle and his team make the butter and cure the meats in this new restaurant next to the O2 Centre. The set lunch is 28 pounds for three courses. Peninsula Square, Greenwich Peninsula, SE10 0SQ.

Galvin at Windows: You may come for the views from the 28th floor of the Hilton on Park Lane and come back for the cooking of Joo Won. It’s 28 pounds for two courses, 33 pounds for three. 22 Park Lane, Mayfair, W1K 1BE.

Le Gavroche: The set lunch is magnificent and inexpensive: It includes wine and water as well as fine French cuisine. You may need to book as far as three months ahead; it is very popular. It costs 55 pounds. 43 Upper Brook Street, Mayfair, London, W1K 7QR.

Helene Darroze at the Connaught: This restaurant has been buzzing since Darroze was named the world’s best female chef this year. Lunch in the beautiful and elegant dining room costs 30 pounds for two dishes, 38 pounds for three, and 45 pounds for four. 16 Carlos Place, Connaught Hotel, W1K 2AL.

Hibiscus: Claude Bosi is among the most creative chefs in the U.K. and the set lunch offers an introduction to his cooking. It’s 49.50 pounds for three courses, including wine, coffee and petits fours. 29 Maddox Street, Mayfair, W1S 2PA.

The Ledbury: Brett Graham’s West London restaurant is among the finest in the country. The lunch features dishes such as wild salmon with tomato, chardonnay, and shellfish butter. It’s 50 pounds for four courses, including water. 127 Ledbury Road, Notting Hill, W11 2AQ.

Little Social: This baby brother of Jason Atherton’s Pollen Street Social is a charming bistro where Canadian chef Cary Docherty cooks up accessible dishes. Lunch is 21 pounds for two courses and 25 pounds for three. 5 Pollen Street, Mayfair, W1S 1ND.

Quo Vadis: This restaurant in an historic Soho building (where Karl Marx once lived) is a favourite with Londoners. They are drawn by chef Jeremy Lee’s British dishes. The all-day Theatre Set menu is 18.50 pounds for two courses, 21.50 pounds for three. 26-29 Dean Street, Soho, W1D 3LL.

Sketch: With its baroque and quirky look, this is a dramatic venue. The gourmet lunch in the Lecture Room is 35 pounds for two courses, 40 pounds for three; both include coffee and petits fours.9 Conduit Street, Mayfair, W1S 2XG.

Wiltons: This is one of London’s oldest restaurants and feels like it. The menu is traditional: It’s like dining in a gentlemen’s club. The lunch menu offers a roast from the carving trolley. It’s 30 pounds for two courses and 38 pounds for three. 55 Jermyn Street, Mayfair, SW1Y 6LX.

U.S. pop star Katy Perry must wait to buy a $15-million US former convent from the Los Angeles archbishop as a judge refused — for now — to evict a local developer who bought it last month from disgruntled nuns.

At a sometimes boisterous court hearing Thursday, with the nuns and their supporters at times booing the archbishop’s lawyer, a judge said the sale of church property by the sisters was improper and invalid. The judge also said the archbishop can’t sell it to the pop diva while the lawsuit is unresolved.

“Nobody gets this property during the pendency of this lawsuit,” California Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant told the lawyers.

The judge set another hearing for Sept. 15 and ordered the lawyers to provide him with proposals for an intermediate remedy that would be best for the five remaining Sisters of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Until 2011, they lived in the Romanesque villa on the 8-acre hilltop estate.

Patrick T. Fallon/BloombergA fountain stands overlooking the valley at the former home of Sisters of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

The case pits two of the five sisters against Archbishop Jose Gomez who agreed to sell the estate to Perry, the flamboyant pop singer who rose to fame with the hit “I Kissed A Girl” and has been known to shoot whipped cream out of her brassiere.

The sisters aren’t fans — “for what should be obvious reasons coming from Catholic nuns,” they said in a filing. They claim the head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles illegally amended the bylaws of the nonprofit that has title to the property in a “hostile takeover” so he could seal the deal with Perry against their wishes.

For his part, Gomez cites both canon and California law as being on his side in the bid to annul the nuns’ transaction with local restaurateur Dana Hollister. She’s taken possession of the place, and has started fixing it up.

“It’s fascinating on all different levels,” said Sonia Lee, a lawyer not involved in the case. “I never thought I’d see the day when Katy Perry is in bed with the archbishop.”

Patrick T. Fallon/BloombergThe former home of Sisters of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary stands on Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

Chalfant ordered lawyers for Hollister and the archbishop to provide him with proposals how much monthly rent the developer, or Perry, should pay for the property, whose main building was designed by the architect who created the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, pending a decision who gets it.

The archbishop accuses Hollister of taking advantage of Sisters Rita Callanan, 77, Catherine Rose Holzma, 86, and other nuns who once lived in the villa, by paying only $100,000 upfront and the balance with a $9.9 million promissory note

His lawsuit, which claims only he and the Vatican can decide the fate of the property, asks that the sale to Hollister “be declared void as a product of elder abuse.”

Hollister called the allegation “ridiculous” and defended the sisters’ mental fitness. “They’re not dumb at all,” she said Wednesday. “No one is saying Warren Buffett is 84 years old and can’t run his own company.”

Patrick T. Fallon/BloombergA fountain stands in front of the former home of Sisters of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

Sister Jean-Marie Dunne doesn’t like Gomez’s attitude either. The 88-year-old has said she doesn’t want any part of the public confrontation, according to court documents, but an e-mail she sent him became part of the record. “OLD AGE does not necessarily = SENILITY,” she wrote.

The nuns moved out of the villa in 2011. Hollister, who lives in another former convent nearby, said she’s done some work, restoring the pool and removing an altar from the main room, which has a 30-foot ceiling and hand-carved fireplace.

According to Sisters Rita and Catherine Rose, Gomez told them last year that he wanted to sell to “someone named Katherine Hudson,” who they later learned was Katy Perry.

They weren’t happy with the idea that they wouldn’t be in charge of proceeds of a sale, nor with the prospect of the villa being occupied by someone who favors bustiers and was described as a “full-on male fantasy” in GQ magazine.

Patrick T. Fallon/BloombergThe dining room is seen at the former home of Sisters of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

“In selling to Katy Perry, we feel we are being forced to violate our canonical vows to the Catholic Church,” Sister Catherine Rose wrote in a June 13 e-mail.

The sisters met Perry in May, at Gomez’s behest. The singer, the daughter of pastors who has a “Jesus” tattoo on her wrist, sang “Oh Happy Day” for them, according to the Los Angeles Times, but failed to impress.

On July 20, the sisters and the nonprofit sued Gomez, and he agreed not to close the Perry sale before an Oct. 15 hearing in that case. As for his suit, he filed to “help the Sisters regain possession of their property and ensure that any future proceeds of an authorized sale will be dedicated to their care,” the archdiocese said last week.

Sister Jean-Marie might not buy that. She called the archdiocese short on “humility and honesty” in her e-mail, and the men in charge “rather obsessed with their misconception of their sovereign, ecclesiastical canonical importance.”

When Mike Huckabee accused President Barack Obama of forging a nuclear deal with Iran that would lead Jews to the “oven door,” Jeb Bush made use of the moment. He could have asserted his pro-Israel credentials in different language. Or, sensing little gain in the transaction, he might have simply reiterated his condemnation of the administration’s Iran policy.

Instead, Bush used the occasion to reinforce his own distance from his party’s flammable fringe.

“Look, I’ve been to Israel — not as many times as Mike Huckabee, who I respect,” Bush said to MSNBC on Monday. “But the use of that kind of language, it’s just wrong. This is not the way we’re going to win elections, that’s not how we’re going to solve problems.”

A good way to tell the Republican base that you share their values even if you don’t speak their language is to signal concern that blunt talk will prove self-defeating — costing votes in the general election. That’s what Bush said; then he said something more interesting: that rhetoric like Huckabee’s is “not how we’re going to solve problems.”

Solving problems is not high on the base’s list of priorities, judging by the robust level of support for Donald Trump. The billionaire’s invective-laden, policy-free and fact- challenged campaign has proved an effective conduit for rage. But Trump scarcely even pretends to be in the solutions business.

In one of the most remarkable political comments of recent years, Bush said last fall that a Republican candidate had to be willing to lose the primary to win the general election. Bush didn’t have to explain why. His premise was widely understood as an expression of concern about his party’s affinity for candidates promising a demolition derby in Washington.

So far, he’s running as if he meant it. Bush’s strategy might be called grownupism. He doesn’t just turn down invitations to stoke anger; he treats them as opportunities to show restraint.

Trump’s emergence appears to be aiding him. Trump hasn’t simply shut off attention to competitors. He has, for the moment, locked down a group of voters who might ultimately make their way to a more viable Bush competitor, especially Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. (Ohio Gov. John Kasich, by contrast, has probably been too accommodating of both government in general and Obama in particular by accepting Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid in his state. Any increase in his vote share is unlikely to be derived from the base.)

Trump’s success has allowed Bush to run not only as the unapologetic establishment candidate he is, but as a challenge to Trumpism and the anti-government extremism it represents. (At least what it represents this week; it’s possible that Trumpism is not an ideologically fixed manifesto.) While many of his party’s voters are dreaming of mass deportation of undocumented, largely Hispanic immigrants, Bush keeps finding ways to remind them why his Spanish is so fluent.

“We are very Hispanic in the sense that we speak Spanish at home,” Bush said to Telemundo — in Spanish — referring to his wife and children. “Columba is very Mexican. She is proud of her U.S. citizenship naturally, but we eat Mexican food at home. Our children are Hispanic in many aspects, and we don’t talk about that. But yes, the Hispanic influence in my family is something quite important in my life.”

None of this would be possible without the enormous assets Bush brings to the campaign — his fundraising prowess, his name recognition and his family’s political network. Without them, he would be an interesting GOP anomaly campaigning against gale- force winds.

Money and connections make Bush an establishment horse. But at least in the early going, a loud billionaire is preoccupying the voters most eager to thwart Bush’s rise. Bush isn’t the type to run a race with abandon. Trump is enabling him to run with extra restraint.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron was criticized Thursday after he used the word “swarm” to describe the flood of immigrants into Europe from North Africa.

Opposition leaders accused the premier of employing dehumanizing language about people who have gathered near Calais in northern France in the hope of getting to Britain illegally through the Channel Tunnel.

Cameron calling Calais migrants a "swarm" is nothing short of disgraceful. Confirms there's no dog-whistle these Bullingdon Boys won't blow.

“He should remember he’s talking about people, not insects,” Harriet Harman, the acting head of the main opposition Labour Party, told Sky News television. “He’s been warned about this for months; just using inflammatory language isn’t going to help.”

Cameron made the comments during a visit to Vietnam in response to questions about the crisis at Calais, where hundreds of people have repeatedly attempted to enter the tunnel and stow away on vehicles crossing to Britain. One would-be migrant was killed when he was crushed by a truck on Tuesday, and there have been calls from some British politicians to send U.K. troops to assist French police in the area.

Related

“This is very testing, I accept that, because you have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain,” Cameron said in an interview with ITV News. “We need to protect our borders by working hand-in-glove with our neighbors the French, and that is exactly what we are doing.”

Andy Burnham, a contender for the Labour leadership, said in a Twitter post that Cameron’s use of the word “swarm” was “nothing short of disgraceful.”

“By blaming ‘migrant swarms’ for the current crisis in Calais, David Cameron risks dehumanizing some of the world’s most desperate people,” Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said in a statement. “By using the prime minister’s language we lose sight of how desperate someone has to be to cling to the bottom of a lorry or a train for the chance of a better life.”

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett also joined the criticism. “No David Cameron, ’swarms’ isn’t an appropriate word for desperate, homeless human beings, including children, fleeing persecution and war,” she said on Twitter.

Stephen Harper isn’t offering any hints on when he will formally begin the campaign for his fourth term as Canada’s prime minister, though he said the election date itself is set in stone.

“I don’t speculate, and I particularly don’t speculate on my own actions,” Harper said in an interview Wednesday at his Ottawa office. “Obviously, there is an important decision coming up for Canadians Oct. 19.”

Recent reports from Reuters and the Huffington Post suggest Harper’s Conservative government is considering beginning the campaign as early as this weekend, which would make it the longest electoral contest in Canada since 1872.

Related

The Conservatives, who took power in 2006, face a tight three-way race in the fall vote against the left-leaning New Democratic Party and the centrist Liberals.

According to national averages compiled this week by polling aggregator ThreeHundredEight.com for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the Conservatives and the NDP are tied at 31.6 percent support, with the Liberals at 26.1 percent.

Starting the election early would increase the spending limit for political parties beyond the $25.4 million cap on a standard five-week campaign. It would also trigger strict limits on advertising from special interest groups, such as labor unions.

The minimum length for a federal election campaign in Canada is 37 days, including the day it is called and the day ballots are cast. For the Oct. 19 vote, the prime minister can request the legislature’s dissolution at any time before Sept. 13. If the election were called this Sunday, the campaign would last 79 days; each of the last two elections were 37 days long.

Mullah Omar, the reclusive cleric who founded Afghanistan’s Taliban guerrilla movement and sheltered al-Qaida leaders as they plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., is dead, an Afghan government official said.

FBI via AP, FileOmar, the one-eyed, secretive head of the Taliban and an al-Qaida ally, led a bloody insurgency against U.S.-led forces after they toppled him from his rule in Afghanistan in 2001.

Omar died two or three years ago, across the border in Pakistan, the official said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. The Afghan government and Taliban declined to confirm or reject the reports.

“We have reports of Mullah Omar’s demise,” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s deputy spokesman Sayed Zafar Hashemi told reporters at a hastily called briefing in Kabul on Wednesday. “We are checking these reports. Once we get a full confirmation on that, we’ll let you know.”

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said by phone the group was gathering information on reports of the death and would release a statement shortly.

The news of the death comes days before the Taliban and Ghani’s administration are reportedly due to hold a second round of peace talks. While it isn’t known if factions loyal to Omar had supported the talks, the Taliban in April had published a biography of the one-eyed jihadist, claiming he was alive and in charge of the militant group.

“This news is aimed at influencing the outcome of talks with the Taliban and reflects infighting within the group,” said C. Uday Bhaskar, director of the Society for Policy Studies in New Delhi. “The militant part of Taliban that doesn’t want talks could be trying to assert itself by leaking this news and appoint a new leader to revive the movement.”

AFP Photo / BBC TV / BBC Newsnight / FilesA file picture taken in Kandahar on an undisclosed date in 1996 shows a TV screengrab of footage taken secretly by BBC Newsnight which claims to show the Afghan Taliban's one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammed Omar (C) during a rally for his troops in Kandahar, before their victorious assault on Kabul.

It’s been almost a century since T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt kicked the Ottomans out of Syria. Now the Turks are coming back, this time with U.S. air support, in a plan to establish a 60-mile-long buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border between the two countries.

If the creation of a new mini-state within the borders of a Middle Eastern state seems worrisome, that’s because it is. As the Israelis learned to their detriment in Lebanon in the 1980s and ’90s, such semipermanent security zones are costly to maintain and produce strange unintended consequences — like the birth of Hezbollah.

But, as crazy as it sounds, the buffer zone might be better than the alternatives, because it could be a first step toward boots on the ground capable of defeating Islamic State.

Since the collapse of Syria began, the Turkish government has been focused on two competing objectives. One is to weaken and ultimately defeat Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, which has meant supporting the Free Syrian Army militias.

From the U.S. perspective, getting Turks to fight the Islamic State is good news — a major development in the slow process of assembling an effective coalition.

The other Turkish goal is to push back within Syria the Kurdish militias, which have both participated in the fight against Assad and taken advantage of the vacuum to expand their territory. Turkey fears and loathes the rise of Kurdish national feeling in the region, because Kurds in Iraq and Syria sympathize with the PKK, a militia that seeks to control majority-Kurdish territory within Turkey.

A buffer zone in Syria, backed by U.S. air power, serves both these Turkish interests. If executed properly, it’ll weaken Syrian sovereignty by establishing a piece of Turkey inside Syria. And it’ll give Turkish troops a zone to push Kurdish militias farther to the east.

Until now, the Turks haven’t been prepared to enter Syrian territory and stay there — partly because it would involve them in head-to-head combat with Islamic State. But that’s changed after a bold suicide attack last week against Kurdish volunteers in Turkey who were headed over the border to fight Islamic State. Now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs to show the Sunni militant group — and his domestic constituency — that he won’t tolerate the Islamic State taking the fight to Turkey.

The other actor in all this is the U.S., which until recently would’ve been horrified by the idea of Turkey carving out a piece of Syria, much less by the notion of facilitating the land grab from the air. President Barack Obama’s Syria strategy (if it can be dignified with that word) has from the start been plagued by a deep ambivalence about Assad’s fate. And the Hamlet-like indecision — should the Assad regime be or not be? — hasn’t been quelled by the passage of time.

Related

What’s more, in Iraq, the Kurdish minority has been a steadfast U.S. ally, and in truth the only set of actors in that troubled country on whom the U.S. has been able to rely since 2003. Turkey is a close ally, too, of course. The U.S. hasn’t embraced dreams of Kurdish statehood in Iraq or more broadly, but it also has no deep interest in the Turks weakening the Kurdish forces in Syria.

The U.S. nevertheless has a pressing need for the buffer zone, because it’s desperate to make inroads — any inroads — against Islamic State. The only way to do that is with local ground troops. No Sunni Arab ground force has emerged to fight the militants. That leaves Iranian-trained and Iranian-officered Shiite militias in Iraq. And in Syria, where the Free Syrian Army hasn’t managed any meaningful victories, it leaves only Kurdish fighters.

Turkish troops would be another matter altogether. From the U.S. perspective, getting Turks to fight the Islamic State is good news — a major development in the slow process of assembling an effective coalition.

That’s why it makes sense for the U.S. to back the buffer zones, despite the risks. Those risks are significant. The zone may be administered by Syrian militias who have ties to anti-American jihadis. It might conceivably be the first step to the fall of Assad — at least that’s what the Turks want. And it also might be another step toward the dismemberment of Syria, which would further destabilize the region.

But a statelet where the Islamic State has been defeated, even if backed by Turkey, will also be a counterpoint to the militant group. And at this point, the U.S. is begging for allies to take on Islamic State. It can’t afford to be choosy.

The flash deal was unlike any that had appeared before on the Chinese group-buying website Juhuasuan: Qualified young men could be paid as much as 5,000 yuan ($805) for making a donation to a government-run sperm bank. The colourful advertisement only appeared for two days on the site owned by the e-commerce titan Alibaba, but it received 22,017 responses.

In China, where public discussion of sex remains tightly controlled by the government, the pitch was the equivalent of a cry for help. The country’s infertility rates are rising rapidly among couples of child-bearing age, reaching 12.5 percent in 2012, compared with 3 percent in 1992, according to a government study. There are about 40 million infertile couples in China, as well as a chronic shortage of sperm donations.

The causes of China’s infertility problems haven’t been established. But among the public, government, and the scientific community, there is growing suspicion that chronic pollution is to blame. In addition, a decade-long study at Shanghai’s government-run sperm bank showed that the quality of the sperm being collected was in decline, suggesting that unhealthy lifestyles — the high rates of smoking and drinking among Chinese men — might be contributing to the shortage. There also is speculation that rising infertility reflects the trend of China’s upwardly mobile couples having children later in life.

There is growing suspicion that chronic pollution is to blame.

Whatever the cause, China’s infertility rates are about the same as those in Europe and North America.

The similarities end there, however. China’s so-called one-child policy places a unique burden on couples to honour the deeply held cultural and familial obligation to perpetuate a family bloodline. And the question of sperm donation is particularly fraught. For recipients, it can be an embarrassment, or perceived as the severing of the blood link between a husband and his family(the focus on bloodlines is also why Chinese families adopt at such low rates). For donors, there is an extreme reluctance to pass on a family bloodline blindly, to produce children who won’t be known to biological fathers, who then wouldn’t be able to fulfill their familial responsibilities.

This reticence on the part of donors accounts for some of the shortages of sperm regularly reported by China’s 19 state-run sperm banks. The discomfort also is reflected in the government’s tight grip on these institutions. Regulations require that donors be between 22 and 45, in good health, disease-free and not gay or foreign nationals. The donors’ sperm count is required to be three times that of an average healthy male, as defined by the World Health Organization.

Some provinces impose requirements that are even more stringent. For example, the centre in Jiangsu Province restricts donations to non-working men — usually students — because career men (or, at least those who want to donate) are suspected of unhealthy lifestyles. That means about 80 percent of sperm donors are turned away, and, as of 2012, 1,000 couples were on a waiting list that was a year and a half long.

AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty ImagesResidents wear masks against the smog in Harbin.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle is the government’s insistence that a single donor’s sperm can only be used for the conception of five children. The regulation was imposed to ensure that children from the same donor father don’t have any chance of becoming mates as adults. But it exceeds most international standards for donor sperm. For example, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends a limit of 25 children per population of 800,000. The British cap is 10 children.

Alibaba’s flash promotion won’t make a dent in the problem. The men who signed up will still be subjected to the rigorous health checks required by national and local law. And many others, who signed up as a lark or were lured by what they believed would be easy money, will probably drop out. At best, the ad could contribute to easing the stigma attached to sperm donations.

Most of the impediments to access to donated sperm would be lifted if the government opened the system to private competition. China already has a thriving if unsavory black market in human sperm, and Chinese state media reports that Chinese women are increasingly making use of overseas sperm banks and IVF clinics. A system that was calibrated to Chinese sensitivities could meet the needs of millions of couples while providing Alibaba with a real opportunity.

On Tuesday at a trio of press conferences in New York City, London, and Sao Paolo, Motorola announced major updates to its line of Android smartphones. Both the flagship Moto X and lower priced Moto G received overhauls, the first since Motorola was acquired by Lenovo from Google in October 2014. There are now three phones, the Moto X Style, Moto X Play, and Moto G, offering everything from a true flagship to a budget-conscious option.

Diane DoironSledding is fast and furious on the curvy track.

These new models will appeal largely to people who have to pay full prices for phones, rather than discounted prices that come with two-year service contracts.

“We’re about delivering great mobile user experiences at a price that doesn’t break the bank,” Motorola President Rick Osterloh told The Associated Press.

The new Moto X Style — which will only be sold in the U.S. — is larger than last year’s Moto X and has significantly boosted specs in almost every regard. Most notably, the display is 5.7 inches instead of 5.2 inches, with QuadHD resolution. It’s big and bright, with slim bezels so the phone isn’t the size of a tablet. The curved back also helps keep the phone from feeling too big. It’s much bigger and much bolder than last year’s Moto X, while still looking very much part of the same family. Turbo charging is another big new feature, letting the phone juice up quickly.

But the biggest question? The camera. The 2014 Moto X’s camera wasn’t even close to competing with those in the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S5, the other high-end phones of last year. The Moto X Style upgrades from a 13-megapixel camera with a faux ring flash to the 21-megapixel shooter with a smaller flash sitting just below the lens. From what Motorola showed at its press conference, the camera looks like a major step up. But whether it produces sharp images with good colour — on a regular basis and in all sorts of lighting conditions — will be the test by which the Moto X Style succeeds or fails.

There’s also a second version of the Moto X, the Moto X Play. It houses the same 21-megapixel camera and dual LED flash, but with a smaller 5.5″ full HD display (1080p). It will cost about $400 in Canada and will be available at Bell Mobility, Koodo, Telus, Videotron and Wind Mobile, Motorola said in a statement.

HandoutSubstantial engine tweaks to both the turbocharged four-cylinder and the 3.8-litre V6 have given the 2013 Genesis Coupe a more sporting identity.

The smartphone maker also says the Moto X Play can achieve a full two days of use from the large battery. This seems like the true successor to last year’s Moto X, while the Style edition pushes Moto into a new tier of flagship phone. However, in a baffling move, Moto has no plans to make this phone available in the United States.

Motorola also updated the more budget-conscious Moto G. It has an HD display, the same 13-megapixel camera that’s in Google’s Nexus 6, and a fast processor, plus it’s water resistant and storage can be expanded by up to 32GB via a microSD card slot. The Moto G can also now be custom ordered through the Moto Maker program, letting customers choose different colour backs, faceplates, and storage options. It’s not quite as powerful as either of the Moto X phones or other flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S6, nor is the display as good, but it’s extremely close for a phone that costs less than one third the price.

Even the shallowest of car salespeople knows that you only put incentives on vehicles people don’t want to buyI think the enviroweenies are getting nervous. U.S. President Barack Obama recently tabled a budget for 2013 that bumped up the incentives for buying an electric car. Or, as they say in congressional legalese, any vehicle that “operates primarily on an alternative to petroleum,” which, with apologies to those shilling natural gas, really means anything that plugs in.
[np-related]
The Democrats’ provisional budget — and, if you were shilling for Republicans Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, that adjective would be altered slightly to “delusional” — sees the maximum incentive for the purchase of EVs increased to $10,000 from $7,500.
Dress it up any you want, but even the shallowest of car salespeople knows that you only put incentives on vehicles people don’t want to buy. And you only increase already substantial subsidies if the consuming public seems particularly reluctant.
Ten big ones is extremely strong medicine, usually reserved for hard-selling luxury sedans long past their due date. Indeed, there’s no way to dress up $10,000 “on the hood” of a $35,200 Nissan Leaf as anything other than desperate measures.
Unlike the tax credit, which ends after the automaker sells the first 200,000 alternatively fuelled vehicles, the proposed increase has no such limits, the credit diminishing after 2016, presumably after meeting President Obama’s ambitious target of “putting one million advanced-technology vehicles on the road by 2015.”
Of course, with 17,345 Chevrolet Volts and Nissan Leafs sold in the United States last year, it’s little wonder the administration is a tad concerned. A skeptic might even go so far as to postulate that Americans seem a little reluctant to embrace the liberal left’s electrified future.
There might be even worse news on the EV front. A University of Tennessee study recently concluded that electric vehicles in China might emit more pollution than gasoline-powered cars. Its conclusion is that, because 75% of Chinese electric power is coal fuelled, an EV operating in China is actually more harmful to the environment than a conventional gas-fuelled automobile. The study was conducted in 34 different cities. It measured everything from dust and metals to the acids produced during the coal-fired electricity production process.
Naturally, any such hiccup has enormous repercussions as China has committed extensive resources to increasing the use of electric vehicles.
“An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles,” Chris Cherry, assistant professor of civil and mechanical engineering at the University of Tennessee, said in a prepared statement online. “Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to. Prior studies have only examined environmental impacts by comparing emission factors or greenhouse gas emissions.”
Of course, there are numerous other studies showing that, even in China, electric vehicles are cleaner and greener than the gasoline-fuelled variety. Nonetheless, it points to a great failing in the great pollution debate, namely that the world’s two greatest polluters — the one with the most cars and the other selling more cars per year than any other country (that would be the U.S. and China, in case you haven’t been paying attention) — both get the preponderance of their energy from the dirtiest of sources.
According to the Canadian Press, another study by one of the world’s top climate scientists — Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria — found that coal is a far greater threat to our planet than burning fossil fuels. Weaver estimates that burning all the commercially available oil from the Alberta Tar Sands would only emit enough carbon dioxide to raise global temperatures by 0.03C, but he adds that firing all the coal still readily accessible in the world would increase the temperature by a disastrous 15C. Yet, there is no public outrage against coal, no groundswell of protest against carbonized plant matter. Moviegoers are not flocking to documentaries lamenting the evils of coal-fed electrical plants.
For the record, I have nothing against a cleaner Earth. Indeed, I believe the automotive industry should and must curb its emissions footprint. What I vehemently oppose, however, is the hypocrisy that sees the piously environmental willing to push us back to the transportation industry’s Stone Age — as in owners who are afraid to leave the city core for fear they will be stranded by their cars — simply because, every day, they can see the object of their ire, while coal-fired electric generators are far from their everyday commute. Out of sight, out of mind is not a justifiable defence for the puritanical rage of all those who see the automobile as the great evil, while virtually ignoring an equal or even greater issue.
What scares me most about this devotion to anything electric is that if the great unwashed masses don’t get with this greener-than-thou program — if even the prospect of ludicrously large financial incentives is not enough to place us on the righteous path — then perhaps these same great minds will decide that, since consumers aren’t smart enough to determine on their own that the electric vehicle is our salvation, it will be perfectly justified to force people to buy them.
Before you dismiss me as just another crackpot, consider the draconian laws being passed banning smoking from public parks based on the dangers of inhaling second-hand smoke in open fields. Those are also being done for our own good.

The Moto X was originally conceived while Motorola Mobility was owned by Google. These first phones under Lenovo don’t show too big a departure by the new owner from the original strategy and rubric, because they are apparently working: according to Motorola president Rick Osterloh, sales are up 118 per cent in the last year. There’s a high-end flagship phone, a budget-conscious phone that won’t slow you down, and a middle ground for people who want top specs without a massive 5.7″ display.

All the new phones come unlocked for use on any carrier and ship with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop installed. The Moto G costs about $199 in Canada and is available worldwide from today. The Moto X Play will be available starting in August.

Bloomberg.com, with files from The Associated Press, Financial Post staff

Turkey’s airstrikes against Islamic State and its decision to allow U.S. warplanes to operate from its air bases are in direct response to terrorist attacks in the Turkish town of Suruc earlier in the week. The cause-and-effect relationship highlights what’s becoming a central strategic dilemma for Islamic State.

Ideologically, the organization embraces the jihadi techniques developed by al-Qaeda, which call for suicide bombings against civilians within regimes deemed to be the enemy. Practically, however, Islamic State’s best chance of survival as a quasi-sovereign entity is to leave its Sunni neighbours alone in the hopes they won’t provide the ground troops that would be necessary to defeat the militant group. The contradiction provides a glimmer of hope for the U.S., which knows that Islamic State can’t be defeated unless its neighbours devote themselves to the fight: Maybe, just maybe, Islamic State will be so foolish as to provoke the very response that the U.S. has been unable to elicit using the logic of persuasion.

The Turkey attack is only the latest example of the dynamic. The horrific burning of a Jordanian pilot downed in December drew an angry and aggressive response from King Abdullah. Islamic State was certainly testing Jordanian resolve — and getting the answer that the kingdom would take a much more aggressive stance toward Islamic State if its subjects were so tortured.

Islamic State stands only to lose from provoking Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait and even Tunisia. So why are these attacks happening?

The bombing of a mosque in Kuwait at the end of June reflected a similar phenomenon. Although the attack was against Shiites, it nonetheless represented a direct threat to Kuwait’s Sunni emir. So far he’s been more cautious than King Abdullah in forming any military response.

The killing of dozens of mostly British tourists in Tunisia on the same day as the Kuwait bombing highlighted the same issues, albeit in a slightly more attenuated way. The Tunisian government now has no doubt that Islamic State is its enemy — but, for the moment, Tunisia is far from the group’s heartland, and isn’t a credible candidate to send more than a token force against it. The U.K., for its part, is already a strong Islamic State opponent, and Prime Minister David Cameron used the opportunity to emphasize British support for operations against the group. Yet like the U.S., the U.K. has been chastened by the Western failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, and won’t be part of a ground initiative in the foreseeable future.

On the surface, Islamic State stands only to lose from provoking Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait and even Tunisia. So why are these attacks happening? There are several possible answers, which are distinct yet interrelated.

Perhaps the most intuitive is that Islamic State has never rejected the al-Qaeda ideology of suicide attacks. True, Islamic State focuses on conquering and holding territory, in contradistinction to al-Qaeda’s strategy of confronting the enemy at its strongest point. That difference has made Islamic State a much more formidable opponent than al-Qaeda thus far. But many Islamic State followers were previously al-Qaeda members or supporters. There’s no clear ideological dividing line between the two organizations; the difference is mainly in strategy. So it would be extremely difficult as an ideological matter for Islamic State to reject suicide attacks.

A related possibility is that Islamic State’s central command, to the extent one exists, can’t really direct or prohibit the efforts of suicide attackers acting in the name of the organization. At least some recent terrorist attacks seem to have been made by al-Qaeda trained actors who simply announced that they were now representing Islamic State — like the perpetrator of the attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris in the same week of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. In general, Islamic State benefits from spontaneous decisions by actors around the world to identify with the organization. It may be that Islamic State simply can’t avoid the associated costs of attacks on parties that the group would be wiser to leave alone.

A third and final explanation is that Islamic State is under a powerful strategic imperative to remain defiantly on the front pages of the world’s newspapers — and can’t always rely on territorial expansion to make news. At the moment, the group isn’t making spectacular territorial expansions. Holding territory and establishing governance is strategically wise. And some headlines can be garnered by acting like a state, collecting taxes, suppressing bribery, and the like.

But terrorist attacks are nevertheless an important part of the public relations strategy, to bring new supporters and streams of sympathetic funding. Recall that Islamic State helped establish its global reputation by the beheadings of Western journalists. These acts served no immediate military strategic advantage. To the contrary, they pushed the U.S. to focus on Islamic State much more than it otherwise might’ve done. Nonetheless, to Islamic State they made a certain sort of strategic sense: They showed that the group wasn’t afraid of the U.S. and the West; they generated vast and lasting publicity; and they became a symbol of a certain utopian/dystopian approach to establishing an idealized Islamic state. The terrorist attacks on the periphery possess some of the same virtues, albeit to a lesser degree.

All this leads to a very slim ray of sunshine on the otherwise bleak horizon of possibilities for defeating Islamic State. In the end, it can only be defeated by a combination of western air support and willing local ground forces. Shiite militias in Iraq, and sometimes Kurdish peshmerga, are so far the only effective ground forces to have been deployed against it. The U.S. badly needs a Sunni Arab force on the ground to win. It’s pretty clear by now that the U.S. lacks the capacity to convince Islamic State’s neighbours, including Saudi Arabia, to provide it. Here’s hoping Islamic State does the persuading on its own. That way, at least, some of the victims of its terrorist attacks may not have died in vain.

Bloomberg

Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard and the author of six books, most recently “Cool War: The Future of Global Competition.”

As the White House campaign to persuade Congress about the wisdom of its Iran nuclear deal moves into its second week, important components of the complex agreement are emerging that will be shrouded from the public and in some cases from the U.S. government itself.

The existence of these secret clauses and interpretations could undermine the public’s trust in the Barack Obama administration’s presentations about the nuclear pact. Already Republicans and other critics of the deal have seized on the side agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency as a weakness in the deal closed last week in Vienna.

The controversy began on Wednesday when Secretary of State John Kerry told House lawmakers behind closed doors that he neither possessed nor had read a copy of two secret side deals between the IAEA and Iran, according to Representative Mike Pompeo, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee who was inside the session. Congress hasn’t seen those side agreements either.

“Kerry told me directly that he has not read the secret side deals,” Pompeo told us in an interview. “He told us the State Department does not have possession of these documents.”

In other cases, secret understandings were provided to legislators. Congress on Monday was given a set of non-public interpretations of the Iran deal, according to House and Senate staffers who have seen the documents. These were part of 18 documents the White House provided to Congress as required under legislation passed this spring that gives Congress 60 days to review the Iran deal.

Of the 18 documents, six are classified or confidential, the staffers told us. These include secret letters of understanding between the U.S. and France, Germany and the U.K. that spell out some of the more ambiguous parts of the agreement, and classified explanations of the Iran deal’s provisions that commit other countries to provide Iran with research and development assistance on its nuclear program. There is also a draft of the U.S. statement to be made public on the day the Iran agreement formally goes into effect.

Related

Those are the secret understandings Congress and the administration have put on paper. But in the case of the side agreements with the IAEA, Congress and the executive branch may not have all the facts. In Wednesday’s closed session, Kerry sparred with Pompeo, who last weekend traveled with Republican Senator Tom Cotton to Vienna last weekend to meet with IAEA officials. Those agency representatives told the lawmakers the that two secret side deals covered how the IAEA would be able to inspect the Parchin military complex and how the IAEA and Iran would resolve concerns about the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.

The Ayatollah knows what’s in the deal but we don’t

The briefing for lawmakers was classified, but the Kerry- Pompeo exchange was not. Pompeo pressed Kerry on the details of the side agreements between the IAEA and Iran. Kerry acknowledged he didn’t know all of the specifics.

A statement distributed by the State Department on Wednesday disputed the characterization that the agreements between Iran and the IAEA were “secret.” Instead, it described them as “technical arrangements” and said U.S. experts were “comfortable with the contents,” which the State Department would brief to Congress if asked.

“It is standard practice for the IAEA and member states to treat bilateral documents as ‘safeguards confidential,’ ” the State Department statement said. “This is a principal the United States has championed throughout the IAEA’s existence to protect both proprietary and proliferation sensitive information. We must be able to ensure that information given to the IAEA does not leak out and become a how to guide for producing nuclear materials that can be used in nuclear weapons, and that countries know their patented or proprietary information won’t be stolen because they are released in IAEA documents.”

But while these agreements may be standard operating procedure in the case of other IAEA nuclear inspections, with Iran it’s potentially more serious. On Thursday, during an open session before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Senator James Risch said his understanding was that one of the IAEA-Iran side agreements would allow Iran to take its own environmental samples at Parchin. Speaking around the specifics, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, chairman of the committee, compared this arrangement to the NFL allowing athletes suspected of taking steroids to mail in their own urine samples.

Kerry and others have told Congress that the agreement about Parchin and the understandings about IAEA inspections in general are largely technical and do not weaken a strong agreement. Needless to say, Pompeo disagrees. “Kerry gave no indications they are seeking these documents and there is no indication he is the least bit worried he doesn’t have access to this. The Ayatollah knows what’s in the deal but we don’t,” he told us, referring to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

For the Obama administration, not having copies of the side agreements between Iran and the IAEA is convenient. The law requires it to give Congress all the documents it possesses and only those documents. If the side agreements are outside the reach of Kerry, they are outside the reach of Congress and the American people.

On the other hand, that fact undermines Obama’s argument that the overall deal can be verified and is transparent. Already Iranian leaders have publicly spoken about the Iran deal in terms vastly different from their American counterparts. The existence of secret understandings of that deal will only exacerbate this tension over time.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about politics and foreign affairs. Josh Rogin is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about national security and foreign affairs.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/eli-lake-and-josh-rogin-the-ayatollah-knows-whats-in-the-deal-but-we-dont/feed0stdThe Security Council votes in favour of a resolution approving Iran's nuclear deal at United Nations headquarters Monday.Boom! The bottom just dropped out of China’s unprecedented efforts to prop up its markethttp://business.financialpost.com/investing/global-investor/china-stocks-just-fell-the-most-in-eight-years-as-imf-warns-beijing-to-butt-out-of-market
http://business.financialpost.com/investing/global-investor/china-stocks-just-fell-the-most-in-eight-years-as-imf-warns-beijing-to-butt-out-of-market#commentsMon, 27 Jul 2015 12:54:45 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=838678

China’s stocks tumbled the most in eight years this morning as investors lost faith in government measures to support the market and the IMF warned Beijing to butt out

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is offering a software patch to close a loophole that let two hackers take control of a moving Jeep sport utility vehicle in an incident spotlighting the vulnerability of connected autos.

The company responded a day after Wired magazine published a story about the software programmers who were able to take over a Jeep Cherokee while it was being driven on a Missouri highway. Fiat Chrysler said in a statement that it’s not aware of any real-world unauthorized remote hack into any of its vehicles.

“This is a very big wake-up call for the industry that shows they have a weakness,” said Egil Juliussen, director of research for consultant IHS’s automotive technology group. “They are worried about it and thinking about what they need to do. But it will be awhile before cars are safe from a hacking attack.”

By 2022, 82.5 million autos worldwide will be connected to the Internet, more than three times the 26.5 million connected cars this year, according to IHS. In seven years, 78 per cent of the cars sold globally will be connected, up from 30 permcent now, the consulting firm said.

Fiat Chrysler said that “after becoming aware of the vulnerabilities in some 2013 and 2014 vehicles equipped with the 8.4-inch touchscreen systems, FCA and several supplies worked to fix the vulnerabilities in model year 2015 vehicles.”

The software update patches the hole in the vehicles’ entertainment system. Owners can download the fix to a thumb drive from a Fiat Chrysler website and install it in 30 to 45 minutes or have the update done at a dealership, the company said.

The automaker plans to contact customers who may be affected and has distributed the update to dealers. The models affected include 2013 and 2014 Ram pickups and 2014 Jeep Cherokee and Grand Cherokee SUVs, as well as some 2015 Chrysler 200 sedans.

Automakers are starting to deploy anti-hacking software, but the defenses are not strong yet, Juliussen said.

“Four or five years ago, there was nothing” protecting cars from hackers, he said. “Today, the automakers are starting to put things in place, but there’s still a long way to go.”

Cars are not as rich a target as banks and retailers, which have credit card information and Social Security data hackers can use to make money. Because the vehicles lack such personal data, the auto industry probably won’t face a concerted threat yet from hackers, Juliussen said.

“There aren’t many ways to earn money from hacking a car,” he said. “You could wreak havoc with traffic flow or cyber warfare, but that’s not the sort of thing an average hacker would do.”

]]>http://driving.ca/jeep/cherokee/auto-news/news/fiat-chrysler-issues-software-patch-after-hackers-control-jeep/feed0std14Cherokee1.jpgAmazon is now worth more than Wal-Mart as stock goes through the roofhttp://business.financialpost.com/investing/buy-sell/amazon-com-inc-passes-wal-mart-as-worlds-biggest-retailer-by-market-value-as-stock-soars-almost-20
http://business.financialpost.com/investing/buy-sell/amazon-com-inc-passes-wal-mart-as-worlds-biggest-retailer-by-market-value-as-stock-soars-almost-20#commentsFri, 24 Jul 2015 12:16:11 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=837100

Amazon has surpassed Wal-Mart as the world’s biggest retailer by market value after a surprise profit sent the e-commerce company’s stock up almost 20% into record territory

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry testifies in the coming days before Congress about the deal he just negotiated with Iran, he will have some explaining to do.

Some Congressional leaders were under the impression that while Kerry was at the talks in Vienna, he was pressing Iran to allow “anytime, anywhere” access for UN inspectors to examine sites suspected of nuclear activity.

Kerry’s account differs: “This is a term that honestly I never heard in the four years that we were negotiating,” he said on Face the Nation on Sunday. “It was not on the table.”

Those words are likely to haunt Kerry this week when he goes before Congress. This is not how others in the administration described the deal in April. Other senior officials said the U.S. was pressing for such access, known as snap inspections, that wouldn’t give Iran the time to hide suspicious activity.

More important, if Kerry knew there would be no “anytime, anywhere” inspections, why did he let so many members of Congress believe this was a possibility while he was negotiating the deal? Under the terms of the final deal, Iran will have at least 24 days before it would be compelled to allow an inspector physical access to a suspected site, a standard that falls short of what most Democrats and Republicans have said would be necessary for a good deal.

When asked about Kerry’s recent remarks, Sen. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told us: “I could have sworn that he had said that, but I know it’s been a topic of discussion for a long, long time.” Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told us: “I think I heard Secretary Kerry use that term once. Any lack of access, delay in time, or lack of being able to verify should be a concern to us.”

It’s not just Republicans who believed there should be snap inspections in a final deal. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat in line to be the next leader of his party in the Senate, told as much to Jewish groups this spring. Now his words are featured in a dark money ad against the Iran deal, quoting the senator calling for a deal with “inspections unannounced, anywhere.”

Rep. Janice Hahn, in a July 2 post on her public Facebook profile, also said the deal should assure “anytime, anywhere” inspections. As did Rep. Alan Lowenthal, in a June 23 floor statement.

Not all Democrats were under the impression that snap inspections were on the table. Sen. Chris Murphy, told us that he thought the talk of such access “was a fiction from the beginning” and that he never heard Kerry say we should expect “unfettered access.” “We should never expect the Iranian government or any government would allow us unfettered unconditional access to military installations,” Murphy said.

The administration says now that the lack of snap inspections doesn’t matter. A White House fact sheet, for example, cheerily asserts: ” ‘Anytime, Anywhere’ inspections are simply unnecessary thanks to the deal.”

This was not the impression the Obama administration left in April, after the White House announced it had the framework for a deal with Iran. Back then, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told Israel’s Channel 2 that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would have immediate access to any site the agency wanted to inspect. Last week, Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, dismissed past talk of “anytime, anywhere” access as a “rhetorical flourish.”

‘Of course it takes some time for an inspector to get some access,’ Albright said. ‘We are talking about a matter of a day or so, not three weeks.’

Also in April, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told Bloomberg journalists that as a part of Iran’s agreement to what’s known as the additional protocol, a more intrusive inspections regime Iran abrogated more than a decade ago, “We expect to have anywhere, anytime access in the sense of a well-defined process with a well-defined end time for access to places that are suspected of out-of-bounds activities.”

Moniz, in interviews on Sunday, said the 24-day standard was consistent with his remarks from April. He also suggested that the deal’s critics may be confused between access to Iran’s declared nuclear facilities (which are rigorously monitored) with facilities Iran would hide from inspectors. Besides, Moniz insists that 24 days is not enough time to hide traces of radioactive material from the IAEA.

Other experts disagree. What’s more, Obama himself once promised the Iran deal was enforceable because America would be able to quickly detect and punish any cheating.

David Albright, a former weapons inspector who is now president of the Institute for Science & International Security, told us he didn’t think Moniz in April meant Iran would have 24 days’ notice.

“Of course it takes some time for an inspector to get some access,” Albright said. “We are talking about a matter of a day or so, not three weeks. A reasonable interpretation of what Moniz said in April would be a few days, not the 24 days in the final agreement.”

All of this brings us back to Kerry’s assertion that he never even heard about these “anytime, anywhere” inspections when he was negotiating the deal. It’s possible Kerry will have an explanation for his remarks on Sunday. But if that doesn’t persuade Congress he’s telling the whole truth about inspections, lawmakers will wonder what else he’s keeping from them about the Iran agreement.

Bloomberg News

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/eli-lake-and-josh-rogin-surprise-iranian-nuclear-inspections-in-24-days/feed0stdThe Security Council votes in favour of a resolution approving Iran's nuclear deal at United Nations headquarters Monday.fb